Title 49—Transportation--Volume 1
PART 379—PRESERVATION OF RECORDS
§ 379.1   Applicability.
(a) The preservation of record rules contained in this part shall apply to the following:
(1) Motor carriers and brokers;
(2) Water carriers; and
(3) Household goods freight forwarders.
(b) This part applies also to the preservation of accounts, records and memoranda of traffic associations, weighing and inspection bureaus, and other joint activities maintained by or on behalf of companies listed in paragraph (a) of this section.
§ 379.3   Records required to be retained.
Companies subject to this part shall retain records for the minimum retention periods provided in appendix A to this part. After the required retention periods, the records may be destroyed at the discretion of each company's management. It shall be the obligation of the subject company to maintain records that adequately support financial and operational data required by the Secretary. The company may request a ruling from the Secretary on the retention of any record. The provisions of this part shall not be construed as excusing compliance with the lawful requirements of any other governmental body prescribing longer retention periods for any category of records.
§ 379.5   Protection and storage of records.
(a) The entity shall protect records subject to this part from destruction, deterioration, unauthorized access, modification and/or data corruption.
(b) The entity shall notify the Secretary if prescribed records are substantially destroyed, damaged, accessed and modified without authorization, or otherwise corrupted.
§ 379.7   Preservation of records.
(a) All records may be preserved by any technology that accurately reflects all of the information in the record and remains accessible in a form that can be accurately reproduced later for reference.
(b) Common information, such as instructions, need not be preserved for each record as long as it is common to all such forms and an identified specimen of the form is maintained for reference.
§ 379.9   Companies going out of business.
The records referred to in the regulations in this part may be destroyed after business is discontinued and the company is completely liquidated. The records may not be destroyed until dissolution is final and all pending transactions and claims are completed. When a company is merged with another company under jurisdiction of the Secretary, the successor company shall preserve records of the merged company in accordance with the regulations in this part.
§ 379.11   Waiver of requirements of the regulations in this part.
A waiver from any provision of the regulations in this part may be made by the Secretary upon his/her own initiative or upon submission of a written request by the company. Each request for waiver shall demonstrate that unusual circumstances warrant a departure from prescribed retention periods, procedures, or techniques, or that compliance with such prescribed requirements would impose an unreasonable burden on the company.
§ 379.13   Disposition and retention of records.
The schedule in appendix A to this part shows periods that designated records shall be preserved. The descriptions specified under the various general headings are for convenient reference and identification, and are intended to apply to the items named regardless of what the records are called in individual companies and regardless of the record media. The retention periods represent the prescribed number of years from the date of the document and not calendar years. Records not listed in appendix A to this part shall be retained as determined by the management of each company.